Pirating Yourself
This section assumes that you have an album or songs completed, and that you are comfortable giving them away on a file sharing network in order to get heard. You also need a computer, and a good Internet connection.
If you are a new band, it’s best to wait until you have a website, and are selling your album online through a site such as cdbaby.com before you share your music. This way, people can buy your physical album and learn about your band if they run across your music on file trading networks. Of course, if all you want to do is share your music with the world, have at it! You’re all ready to go.
You should encode all of your music in MP3 format at a moderate data rate, and then make sure that all of the MP3 tags and file information is complete. Include band name, song name, and if you can get it into the file tags, your website. The file name itself should have the band name, album name if applicable, and song title. Don’t put your website or other junk into the file name. If it’s obvious that it’s an advertisement of some sort, sharers will avoid your files.
The next step is to see if you can get an older computer. You won’t need a powerful one, but you’ll need to leave it up and running in order to let people get your music. Don’t try to do this with dial up. You should have a broadband connection. Because you may end up installing file sharing utilities that have spyware on it, it’s best to keep this separate from your main computer.
Next, if you're technically savvy, install MLdonkey, which is a file sharing program that doesn't have spyware and will get you on most all of the major networks in one shot. Otherwise, get on as many of the file sharing networks as possible using the p2p programs with which you're comfortable. Make sure that they share to the same directories so that you can put your songs in one place to be picked up by all of them. You should also configure them to allow a higher upload rate than their default, so that people can get your music quickly. You do not want them to cancel the download because it’s too slow, especially because you are probably going to be one of very few sources for the download.
To use file sharing to your advantage, think hard about how people use these services. They usually want a particular song, or album, and they find it by searching on a phrase or set of words to get their song. You want to come up on those searches. The way to use these things is to title your songs similar to other popular songs so that you’ll come up. For example, we have a song called "Santa Doesn’t Like You". That should come up around Christmastime when they search on Santa! Having an amusing song title helps to catch their attention too, and makes them curious enough to download the song.
Once you copy all of your files to the sharing directories, leave your computer up all of the time, and keep track of the uploads. If your website has been up for a while, and has been submitted to the search engines, you have the possibility to make new fans all over the world as they search on your band name. You are tapping into the tremendous potential word-of-mouth that we discuss in our 6 Degrees of Distributionsection, with the further possibility of people stumbling upon your music by chance on these popular file-sharing services as well.
File sharing isn't enough. The next step is to promote your music. See the promoting your music section to see our recommendations for promotion.